[Ksummit-2012-discuss] [ATTEND] Memory management

[Johannes Weiner]

Hello,

I would like to attend KS2012.

These days I'm focussed on memory cgroups (performance optimization
and better integration into the rest of the VM) and page reclaim (in
memcgs, in the presence of dirty pages, and better adapting to changes
in the page cache working set and protection of existing cache).

Prodecurally, I wish there was a separate memory management tree that
isn't based on -next.  As was apparent before, and established in the
linux-next thread, quite some half-baked changes make it into -next
and developping on top of that is very hard.  Currently, I develop,
test, and benchmark against Linus' releases, and then rebase to -mm
for smoke tests and submission, which is crap, but at least I can make
progress.  I expect a requirement for this would be to take something
else off of Andrew's hands, and if so, I'm not sure how to do that.

I would like to discuss if there is interest in a framework for
benchmark result comparison.  Everyone seems to have their own
(ad-hoc) benchmark suites with custom invocation, evaluation, and
comparison scripts.  To make both test and evaluation recipes easily
exchangable, I hacked together some tools that take job spec files
describing workload and data gathering, and evaluation spec files
describing how to extract and present items from the collected data,
to compare separate collection runs (kernel versions) at the push of a
button.  It also has individual tools that can be stuck together in
shell pipes to quickly explore, plot etc. a set of data.  It's not
meant to replace existing suites, but rather to wrap them in job and
evaluation recipes that are easy to modify, extend, and share.  Maybe
this can be a foundation for building a common benchmark suite that
can be transferred and set up quickly, and includes agreed upon
performance/behaviour metrics so people can do regression testing
without much effort?  Code for the daring is available here:
http://git.cmpxchg.org/?p=statutils.git;a=summary

I would also like to partake in the memcg writeback discussion
proposed by Fengguang.

Thanks!